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You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy

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Re: You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy

#41

Post by cupscale »

bartread wrote: post #36
cupscale wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehhh sorry, saying things like "I'm Albert Einstein and you're all just fucking monkeys scratching in the dirt" doesn't strike me as the speech of someone who's particularly nice. Most people (at least in my experience, you know, the one who's making the subjective judgement about him being a dick) can be angry without saying something pretentiously mean like that. It's ok for the conclusion here to be, "Rick's an as…

I don't know: in my experience pretty much everyone has a breaking point somewhere and once they reach it things can get pretty random. I've seen people I thought had it all together just completely lose the plot and disintegrate too many times to believe it's all bubbling away there, just below the surface, in all of us.

Your reasons for being an asshole don’t change the end result though. It just changes the context around it.

Similarly I can understand how an aggressive dog came to be (poor training, etc.). That won’t change my opinion that the dog should be put down when it mauls a kid, you know?

Re: You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy

#42

Post by cupscale »

oceanswave wrote: post #35
cupscale wrote: post #6

Yeah, wow. I mean, Rick's a dick, no doubt. But much like Frankenstein's monster, it's incredibly easy to see who had a hand in transforming Rick into what he became. It's hard to read the original article and not see several large "where the hell was management" red flags: > Any time there was a particularly challenging problem, Rick would handle it. That's a management failure , and a particularly egregious one tha…

Is he, really? Seems like the most dedicated employee mentioned in the article. Could his devotion be tempered by management and molded into a better hammer for the company? Sure seems like it. Seems like Rick was well respected to be placed so much responsibility - the real dicks here are the ones who led to his decline without intervention.

Er, yeah, he is. You can be devoted, respected, and admired but still be an asshole. They’re not mutually exclusive traits.

See also: Steve Jobs, famously.

Re: You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy

#43

Post by snarfy »

You don't get what you deserve. You get what you get.

There is a misconception that if you do the extra work you will get compensated some way either through promotion or bonus. It's simply not true. You are paid for the position you were hired for.

Rick should have left the moment he took on more work without matching compensation. Why wouldn't the business pile more work on Rick? It's free. As soon as it costs money, all of the issues brought up in the article would be addressed. Suddenly management cares.

Re: You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy

#44

Post by donatj »

Sevrene wrote: post #14

While I can agree there are 'real' rockstar developers that act like the original article mentions, I don't think whether Rick was or wasn't one of them is what matters here. What matters most here is how management dealt with him and their lack of responsibility for Rick's work for the last two years(!) and the end as their result. Other industries seem to get this better than ours. I've worked in quite a few places…

I worked for a company for five years as first a junior and later senior developer. My reviews were always glowing. I got promoted to lead shortly after our current lead left. I worked 10 hour days harder than I had ever worked in my life and developed a stress disorder I needed to take medication for.

When my review came around I was told I was not getting enough done. There was zero possibility of me getting more done. I had given so much of my life and my health for a company I thought I loved? The next day I contacted a former coworker who had been poking me to come work with him, and a couple weeks later I was gone. Best decision I’ve made in my life!

Re: You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy

#46

Post by brooksbp »

1:1 conversations outside of normal work context can help. Dropping the work context is critical to having a human:human conversation. Most people don't have the heart to do it (for real).

If your approach always begins/ends with 'from my side' or even worse 'from our side' (team/mgmt context), you will always fail to connect with and influence someone like Rick. This sort of language will just reinforce the division between Rick and everything else.

It takes one to know one. If you know that someone like Rick is just 'so different', or if you just have that 'gut feeling', you need to find someone who can connect with Rick. An age gap (20+ yrs) helps too; reach out to the respected elders in the company.

If you can show that you care about this person, and want them to be successful and healthy, then they might start to listen to you. All you really need is their attention.

Re: You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy

#48

Post by falcolas »

marktangotango wrote: post #38
coldtea wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were a lot of failures in the Rick story "on all sides" as POTUS would say. Nope, there weren't. That's what management is for. Everything that happened, since they didn't attempt any change, is their fault and their only.

Naw, at the very least Rick was guilty of hubris and naïveté. I came in after a Rick left once, that guys ignorance and poor decisions hobbled that company for years. Icarus is not held in high regard, by anyone.

Yes. How dare Rick be human; to be missing traits which are typically obtained by teaching, not by osmosis. The story of Icarus is, one, completely fictional, and two, a parable used for teaching such traits.

Re: You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy

#49

Post by falcolas »

cupscale wrote: post #41
bartread wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know: in my experience pretty much everyone has a breaking point somewhere and once they reach it things can get pretty random. I've seen people I thought had it all together just completely lose the plot and disintegrate too many times to believe it's all bubbling away there, just below the surface, in all of us.

Your reasons for being an asshole don’t change the end result though. It just changes the context around it. Similarly I can understand how an aggressive dog came to be (poor training, etc.). That won’t change my opinion that the dog should be put down when it mauls a kid, you know?

Perhaps it's the dog's owners who should be put down. After all, they'll just get another dog and make it as aggressive as the previous one...

Blaming an innocent for how they were cultivated is silly. Especially when those innocents can be rehabilitated.

We're getting a little off topic, but this company is just setting up another Rick to take the blame when the train goes off the tracks again.

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